Stephen Fenton Email & Phone Number

Redmond, Washington, United States

Redmond, Wa

In this position, I work to ensure an audio experience in mixed reality applications (HoloLens, Windows Mixed Reality) that augments the visual and tactile experience to help first-line workers, retail employees, and more become more productive using Windows Mixed Reality devices and applications.

Redmond, Wa

In this position, I am in charge of several music analysis areas that are used in various products and plugins throughout Microsoft that enable and enhance creativity within different mediums.This area requires a significant amount of research, from spectral analysis of music and audio to applications of resulting data. I was also confronted with the problem that several research areas of music analysis revolve around very specific data sets, and how Microsoft's solution could be universally applied to any input song, leading me to come up with slight variations on existing heuristic-based solutions.I have written the following music analysis techniques:- Song Segmentation: the breakdown of a song of where the sections change, based on sudden variance in the chromatic elements of a chromatogram, derived from the spectrogram; following this is the clustering of sections together to try and identify some semblence of structure (e.g., a verse-chorus-verse-break-chorus pattern would be clustered as 1-2-1-3-2).- Key detection: This algorithm serves as described, with key detection running over both full input tracks and individual song sections.- Beat/tempo detection: Microsoft's beat detection system was developed from an existing state-of-the-art heuristic implementation and augmented with various tweaks and improvements that allow it to run across a variety of songs and perform quickly.- Bass isolation: I was responsible for bass content isolation and resynthesis.I also developed various tools and utilities around this music analysis, including plugins for the Groove music service, outputting various debug formats for the analysis results (e.g. music files annotated with beat locations, images representing spectral/self-similar representations of music), and interfacing with program managers, designers, and developers from various disciplines, teams, and even continents.

Redmond, Wa

In this position, I was in charge of interfacing with program managers and software developers in order to assess the quality of data uploaded from Windows machines in Groove Music and Movies & TV in order to help identify problems in music/movie sync telemetry, purchase information from the Microsoft Store, and build new tools to help drive down development time and test new visualization and data ingestion techniques.I was able to develop real-time queries to help us identify sudden failures in the music and movie service, identify issues in the Store that were preventing/depressing purchase numbers, and work with other team members to quickly resolve these issues.In this time I also prototyped multiple utilities, data visualization systems, and data ingestion tools to help speed up our processing pipeline and development timeline. One tool, based on hours estimated for producing multiple scripts and a visualization, was able to reduce estimated engineering hours from 13 to 3.

Seattle, Wa

I was an intern on the telemetry team on Xbox Music. I was in charge of creating a tool that allowed automatic responses for sudden changes in user data (i.e. crashes, failures, bug encounters) and would assist the developers in isolating and fixing these issues.

Redmond, Wa

I was an intern on Surface Music Kit. My responsibilities included designing a test plan for a component of the system and acting upon that plan. I also worked on the Windows 8 Sound Recorder test plan during this time period.